News Roundup: BlizzCast 16, Dungeon Journal, 4.2 Game Plan and more!

In the midst of the flood of 4.2 details they've been sharing, Blizzard have still managed to sneak in some quality posts on their forums. Today's posts include teasers for the in-game Dungeon Journal (a feature previously mentioned at BlizzCon) that will be coming with Patch 4.2, as well as some hope for engineers being tortured by their own devices.

Today also marks the triumphant return of the BlizzCast (the last one having come out before Cataclysm release!), which is now available in magical video format and includes interviews with Tom Chilton, Dave Kosak and Cory Stockton about Patch 4.2!

BlizzCast 16

Blizzard Entertainment

We're excited to present the first-ever video BlizzCast, now in beautiful full-motion 2D! (Don't forget to wear your 2D glasses.) We've also jam-packed this episode with juicy information on World of Warcraft patch 4.2. Rob sits down with Game Director Tom Chilton to find out what the patch is all about, Lead Quest Designer Dave Kosak lays out info on the new Firelands quest hub, and Lead Content Designer Cory Stockton spits and flows on Ragnaros and the upcoming raid content.

Head over to the BlizzCast site to download the video. We also have an mp3 audio version available if you prefer to digest your BlizzCasts the old-fashioned way.

4.1 Patch Notes Updated

Zarhym

Dungeons & Raids

Dungeon Finder

The Dungeon Finder will attempt to place players from the same realm in a party together.

Quests & Creatures

An updated quest chain has been added for the Alliance in Winterspring. Players seeking out the Reins of the Winterspring Frostsaber should speak with Rivern Frostwind at Frostaber Rock.

Dungeon Journal Coming in Patch 4.2

If you want to reach the maximum potential of your class, sure, there are number crunchers out there who will tell you the best talent and stat choices to make, spell/ability rotations, etc. But the information you need to be successful in your role is really all in the game. We've gone to great lengths to ensure things are clear enough that you can make some meaningful choices for your character's power on your own, and still have a great shot at catching onto what makes you excel.

If you're speaking at all about boss encounters, I think you'll dig the Dungeon Journal (formerly referred to as Encounter Journal) coming in patch 4.2. Once we're able to catalog more of our dungeons in this journal, you'll get a lot of essential information for each boss fight. It's not going to tell you how to beat the fight, but it's going to tell you what kind of abilities the boss will be using against you. You'll just have to figure out with your party or raid how to deal with those abilities when they're used. Dungeon Journal will also help you find the loot you're looking for from each boss ahead of time, so you have items in mind you hope to get before even setting foot in the dungeon.

Why do people just dismiss others by saying "look it up on wowhead/mmo-champion/wowwiki/elitest jerks/etc"? I've played many other MMOs before and they didn't need "research" as you people put it like WoW supposedly does. And they were still fun. Phantasy Star Online is still going on after 10 years without any expansions or updates and people still enjoy it and they don't need to research a bunch of stuff for encounters and so forth.

So please, I think we are going in the wrong direction if the pre-requisite to playing WoW is akin to studying for a test at uni.

Thank you.

The 4.2 Game Plan (is 7 Bosses "Enough"?)

Bashiok

Yes, Firelands is the raid in 4.2, and 7 is the total number of bosses.

We think 7 is our current ideal for number of bosses in a raid. (We launched Cataclysm with two full raids of 4-6 bosses each.) We're also spending a lot of time making the Firelands bosses as awesome as possible - - creating unique models, animations, effects, sounds, etc. etc. Previously a lot of bosses were larger versions of existing models, which was fine, but that tradeoff is made somewhere. We shift to making fewer but more epic boss fights and there's a tradeoff somewhere. We're concentrating our efforts into a smaller number of fights so that each fight is bigger and better, they're still obviously going to be extremely challenging, but once it is on farm you're not having to spend two, three, maybe four nights just to clear it because the raid is so huge.

Our ideal situation would, of course, be to launch as many raids as possible with this current ideal number of around 7 bosses, but that's not something we're ever going to promise. We'd love to be able to produce unlimited amounts of content anywhere, not just raids, for that matter. We think one raid per patch with around 7 bosses is a super solid experience, though, especially with how much effort is going into Firelands. We don't think anyone is going to be disappointed.

On a side note, the whole daily quest thing hasn't sparked much excitement yet, but with the preview going live here in a few hours (and BlizzCast 16) hopefully we can impress how awesome that's going to be, too.

Again, there's a pretty aggressive development cycle for 4.2, so it's not going to be very long before we're on the PTR, and not very long (comparatively) before release.

I'm sorry but 7 bosses is not ideal for raiders. Did you not learn from TOC? Heck, atleast TOC allowed you to do 10 and 25 mans which totaled 10 bosses for the week.

Sugarcoat it all you want, 7 bosses is still 7. Ulduar had 14 and was amazing. I don't remember anyone complaining about that.

Yeah, I mean that's a tough situation because our feeling is simply that people shouldn't be forced to play the game more than a couple nights a week to keep up on progression. We realize though that some people legitimately like playing every night, and having real reasons to be in the game and playing with raid groups and such. There's obviously things like alts, professions, achievements, PvP, to keep people busy, but it's ultimately something we'd like to get a better handle on. Having content that isn't forcing people to log in every night, but still offering something that's meaningful for those that do. Understand though that by definition those types of things can't lead to player power or else everyone will be back to having to log on every single night to keep pace. Anyway, it's something we very much want to get a better handle on, but it's not something we're going to solve easily.

From what I gather from the preview... The new dailies will create the feeling of being forced to complete them every day with the way the phases and whatnot unfold for each individual character.

no?

Well, someone doing the dailies every day will certainly achieve the rewards faster than someone who doesn't... But there's no comparison between coordinating 10 or 25 people to put all their concentration into the game for many hours a night, multiple nights, and someone choosing to log in and do a few quests by themselves every day.

...

I think the thing to probably take away from this is that content is not infinite, and so we have to look at everyone who plays the game and try to be smart about where we focus this finite pool of development resources we have.

As someone else very astutely mentioned earlier, Sunwell had 6 bosses, and I remember people being outraged that they were gated to unlock over time to stretch out that content. Firelands has 7 bosses and they aren't gated. We hope people enjoy them as much, and will be able to look back as fondly on it as they do on Sunwell.

Negative Effect of the Dungeon Finder Call to Arms

Zarhym

I believe Blizzard had good intentions with this new system, however, players have made it an utter failure.

While it was a good idea to bribe tanks and healers to come and do heroics more, this has essentially made doing heroics 1,000,000,000% more irritating.

Why?

Well, as a result of bribery from Blizzard, the million and one bad players who currently are dps come out from under their non-descript rocks and claim to be tanks and healers.

The result is an average failure rate of about 98% on each and every heroic because the so-called tank or healer is simply not even close to being mentally, nor gear-wise, prepared to take on these roles, resulting in always failing to complete the heroic.

As a secondary result, I am completing far less dungeons a day than before this change.

How inconvenient! :p

I understand your concern to an extent, but isn't there a point where you concede that people need to get their feet wet before learning how to swim? Perhaps players inexperienced with the roles of tanking or healing are giving it a try for a chance at some good rewards and lower queue times. Why not see how Call to Arms changes the trends of group successes/failures and queue times over a period of time slightly longer than 48 hours? The patch has been out two days. I don't think you can adequately say your experiences since the release of 4.1 are indicative of how this feature affects Dungeon Finder groups in the long run. :)

Are ZA / ZG too long?

Despite the familiarity many people may have felt they had with these dungeons, they've gone through some significant enough changes and updates that we fully anticipate a certain amount of time for learning the encounters anew. We're keeping a close eye on the time it takes for groups to get through these dungeons and will adjust as necessary IF it's deemed necessary to adjust the encounters in any way.

I looked for a thread about this, because I thought I saw one yesterday, but I couldn't find it. Does anyone else think ZA/ZG are too long. I love them. They are exciting, challenging, and way fun, but in my busy life, I just can't seem to find time to do a full run. In the three I have completed thus far, I did not have any where the group stayed the same.

I guess I long for the days of WOTLK (and not the easy part of WOTLK), where the dungeon design was 30-45 min. per run. I wonder why they went away from that design plan. A heroic can be very challenging and still 30-45 min in length.

Death by Rocket Boots

I just had em fail and burn me for like 85,000 dmg. What the heck?

"Rocket Fuel Leak" was specifically meant as an alternative failure for dungeons, raids, and battlegrounds so we weren't launching people up into unknown invisible (or otherwise) roofs and getting them stuck or allowing content exploitation. In 4.1 it was fixed so that this failure was actually properly going off in these specific types of content.

Reevaluating the damage though, we're going to apply a hotfix to bring it down quite a bit (it won't be able to kill you outright anymore). Keep an eye on the hotfix blog as it'll be added once it goes through: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/2690293#blog

댓글

Zebuh의 댓글

So there will be a staff to transform into the staghelm's forms... CAN'T WAIT.

atomicwolf22의 댓글

on 2011-04-29T02:54:46-05:00

Dungeons & Raids

•The Dungeon Finder will attempt to place players from the same realm in a party together.

Want if I don't want people on my server to know that I know how to tank and have no issues? I can see now all the spam whispers asking me to tank a dungeon for them. Hmm looks like I be tagged away.

Interest의 댓글

on 2011-04-29T09:06:14-05:00

The Dungeon Finder will attempt to place players from the same realm in a party together.

Awesome. Now if someone ninjas stuff they are screwed =D.

"Rocket Fuel Leak" was specifically meant as an alternative failure for dungeons, raids, and battlegrounds so we weren't launching people up into unknown invisible (or otherwise) roofs and getting them stuck or allowing content exploitation. In 4.1 it was fixed so that this failure was actually properly going off in these specific types of content.

Reevaluating the damage though, we're going to apply a hotfix to bring it down quite a bit (it won't be able to kill you outright anymore). Keep an eye on the hotfix blog as it'll be added once it goes through: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/2690293#blog

Good. Rocket Fuel Leak is the #1 reason I stopped using that enchant. It just causes too much damage if it fails.